Barack Obama: "If it's all about core principles ... we will never get anything done."
Reagan is laughing in his grave. W is laughing up his ass.
It seems to me that you fight fight fight -- not for everything, but precisely for your core principles. Fight like you don't care whether you win the next election, and that is why I don't mourn the loss so many Democratic Blue Chickens. Even I understand that if you are going to vote like a Republican on core issues, you might as well elect a Republican.
This debate, especially the internal Democratic debate, should have been conducted before the midterm elections.
Obama may believe that he has Republicans surrounded by waiting two years for the failure of their tax and economic plans he has adopted as his own and that if the economy improves, claiming credit for preventing tax increases.
The first outcome would ruin the country. The second outcome would be re-election to the White House effectively as as Republican.
He denounces "politics" the way a bad poker player would denounce bluffing. Denouncing politics is like denouncing the weather, denouncing the law of supply and demand, denouncing all rules. Politics is the way that policy gets made, and pretending it shouldn't exist simply marks Obama as a very poor practitioner.
If he believes his "compromise" will achieve even half his "core principles," he is deaf and blind as well as dumb. These plutocratic Republican obstructionists are beyond political salvation and will find a way to turn the economic disaster they have created into a winning platform.
I sympathize with the atmospherics. And I agree that Obama should have recognized by late spring of 2009 that the Congressional Republicans had no intention of doing anything but obstruct.
ReplyDeleteBut given the gutlessness of the Senate Democrats regarding the filibuster, the de facto extra-constitutional change of the Senate to require super-majorities for any legislation, and the cynical decision of all Senate Republicans to use this extra-constitutional approach to block anything of signficance, what was Obama to do in Dec. 2010?
Does anyone really believe that letting tax rates go up on everyone on Jan. 1 to make a point about the obscenely low tax rates on the super rich could, given the media environment, possibily inure to the Democrats' benefit? We could talk about Republican hostage-taking until the cows come home, but the headlines and story line would be that Obama let middle class taxes rise. And with the new Congress, we would end up in the same place.
The problem is not what Obama is doing now, but, rather, his and the Senate Democrats failure in 2009 to come to grips with the Republican rule or ruin approach to governance.
Here is the biggest problem: The party of non-government has no qualms about shutting down the government for partisan gain. But the party of government (i.e., the party that actually believes in government) will always be in a worse dilemma, because it wants government to succeed.
At the moment, in chess parlance, the Congressional Republican Party and its plutocratic underwriters have the Democratic Party and the non-rich in check. How many moves to checkmate (i.e., a permanent destruction of government as the force to save capitalism from itself and the planet from the ravages of climate change)? That may depend on the skill of Democrats; or it may be that Rupert Murdoch has already destroyed America.
Sometime in the next decade we may well see the collapse that Obama helped to avert in 2009. And when that happens, it will be like 1932 all over again. We were fortunate in the 1930s that we had a leader who saved democracy and saved capitalism from itself. We just as easily could have descended into fascism. So we will need to find the energy and the commitment to work to prevent this destruction.